Oral History Photo courtesy of the College of the Atlantic Archives.
Steve Thomas
With this issue’s focus on the college’s middle years, we decided to check in with Steve Thomas, COA’s director of admission from June 1989 until September 1998, who is now director of admission at Colby College. The new Kaelber Hall had been dedicated the summer before. The student residence Blair/Tyson had not yet been built. With enrollment at about 180 in a new campus designed for 250, COA was still in recovery mode from the 1983 fire. Donna: What was it like coming to COA? Steve: I remember thinking at my interview, “This isn’t like any other place I’d ever worked … but I really love these people and I love the mission.” And I went with my gut, like I hope kids do when they visit. I remember walking down the driveway to Turrets my first day, walking into this sort of fairytale stone castle. I literally had to pinch myself. I did. I pinched myself! And then I learned all of the intricacies of COA. Well, I began to learn. One of the things that was really difficult was that I don’t think we had room for maybe forty kids on campus, for student housing. I remember saying to Lou [Rabineau, COA’s third president], and to [trustee] Ed Blair. “I can explain to a parent why we don’t have a gym. But I really can’t explain why we don’t have a place for students to live. That just doesn’t fly with them.” I didn’t feel like you had to have a room for everybody on campus, but you had to have a room for the first years, and for most of the second years. There were other problems. We didn’t serve many meals. I said, “Call me crazy, but I think we’ve got to have a meal plan of some kind!” You could get soup and bread, but there were no dinners. There wasn’t anything organized. You had to give the people what they wanted, and they wanted good food. One of the great things is you go from 1989 where we’re serving a pot of soup and bread, to 40 | COA
maybe five years later, COA is number one in the country for food at any college. Donna: And then Blair/Tyson was built? Steve: It really changed everything. Now we were sort of a destination college instead of one where— get an apartment downtown, you’re on your own, sorry. Which is fine after you’ve been there for a year, but the parents certainly don’t want to hear that for their 17- or 18-year-old kid—no matter how independent they are! So, we began this talk about integrating student services, and it was decided that I would become director of admission and student services. Because as an admission person, you had to be able to promise something and then deliver. And if you didn’t have control of things like housing and food and orientation and activities, you couldn’t really deliver on very much. Donna: So was that was the first time COA had student services and counseling? Steve: Oh, we had it. We had had housing, food, orientation, counseling—but it didn’t report to one person. We slowly put all those units together. When I left, it split into different things. I think that the housing, probably more than anything, held back the growth in numbers. Once you took that off the table as a barrier, people looked at COA very differently. We went from 180—I don’t know how many years this took, three